To: The Honorable Burt Lifland
From: The Venerable Irv Picard
Burt:
Just a follow-up to clarify yesterday's filing.
1. The $300,000 line item to pay Lee Richards is old news. You were the one that appointed him as Trustee in the first place, and however coincidental it might be that he was the same Court-appointed Trustee in the '92 case involving Mr. Madoff, I'm confident that the $300,000 he received for his several weeks of work is appropriate.
2. With respect to my fees for the recent 6 months; we invoiced at $210,000 a day and my personal share was a paltry $835,000 for the period. Burt, I spend more than 6 hours a day dealing with everything from kvetchers that can't hear me on the phone when I tell them they should call back in two weeks, to "SIPIC Steve" badgering me to keep the claim payments to a slow crawl, to Chuck Schumer's people asking me to speed up payments for some of his friends.
On top of that, I've got Jamie Dimon's people sending me 10 copies a day of the Fortune Magazine edition with his face on the front, and Larry David's people calling non-stop to sign me up for a guest-starring role. And people are thinking that I'm getting paid too much?! Ha!
Despite what Ken Feinberg might say, I've earned every penny of the 1200 hours that I've billed out for. And, you'll notice that I kept my expenses to just $921.00 for this latest period; of which $125.00 went towards that Sable's nova platter that your office staff had us send over.
Another $160 went towards alcohol-free hand sanitizer for our entire firm--which saved us thousands in sick day pay, and we needed to expense $80 for the purchase of Caoni Chocolate; the people at AlixPartners told me they couldn't decipher the microfiche without it.
The bottom line, Burt, is simple: Our $22 million tab is being paid by SIPC, which is being funded in part by Tim Geithner. Its' not coming from the claimant pool.
On top of which, since I'm being paid by SIPC, my job is to not pay claims, and I'm doing that job. The pool is overflowing; ask any of the people that we keep telling to "call us back in two weeks!" Ask Steve Harbecht, and have him show you the thank you letter from Tim Geithner!
On the collection side, even though we might have agreed to bury under the rug the $250 million issue with JPMorgan, and despite the fact that we might be giving up the Merkin pursuit, we do have a handshake agreement from Jeff Picower for him to send back some money, and we're expecting a real windfall by auctioning off Bernie Madoff's website. The domain name alone is worth thousands, and the ad revenue can deliver even more for the lucky group that buys the site
To summarize; these things take lots of time; thousands, if not tens of thousands of billable hours. So trust me, the $22 million tab for the past six months is a cheap price to pay for what we've accomplished so far. If I were to bet, its only a fraction of what the Justice Dept. has spent for those donuts being delivered to the 17th floor over at the Lipstick Building.
By the way Burt, I know that some guy named George Costanza keeps sending you notes kvetching about me, but he's not getting paid any faster than anyone else, unless Chuck Schumer says so, and unless Steve Harbecht agrees. What with the holiday schedule coming up, and what with Steve going down to Boca for two weeks in December, nobody should expect anything until after the first of the year.
On a completely different note, thanks for pointing me to Madoff's Mixer on Janey Wells's cocktail menu, I could use a strong drink right about now!
Happy Turkey, Burt!
Irv


